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I was introduced to the work of Catalan artist, Antoni Tapies, by my good friend, Hadley Smith. An artist herself, her relief paintings were highly influenced by Tapies' use of richly modeled and textured canvases, found objects and materials and as she always says, "the big X". I was immediately drawn to Tapies' work, but, not a painter myself, I turned to the camera, my tool of choice, to "find" Tapies out in the world.

I don't claim to bring Tapies' depth of anguish or life experience to this work. This is a visual exercise to capture the delight in finding art in the most unexpected places like the walls of New York's High Line, a parking lot in Palm Springs or gas caps in the sidewalks of Barcelona and San Francisco.

This book is a compilation of "found" images; they are from cracks in the sidewalk, graphic street paving, decaying paint on old industrial buildings, graffiti on old doors, amazing textural qualities of materials such as bronze or cor-ten steel as well as unique patterns in architecture and its shadows.

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Jonathan Pearlman began taking pictures with a Kodak Instamatic 124 with flashcubes in 1967. A serious attention to photography began with the purchase of a Canon FTB single-lens reflex in 1974. He soon set up a darkroom at home and learned the in's and out's of developer, stopbath and fixer. Wandering through seedy areas of New York City, he tried to emulate the black and white photos of David Plowden in his book, The Hand of Man on America.
A stint as the photo editor of his college newspaper led to a three-year engagement as an architectural photographer for Margaret Henderson Floyd, a leading New England historian. While studying architecture, he made a modest living photographing buildings in Boston, Austin and in Italy.
Digital photography has made taking pictures a commodity, but Jonathan still looks for the composition and detail that makes photography worthwhile and satisfying. He is a practicing architect in San Francisco, California.